Chile, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

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Easter Island is an amazing place. We'd been looking forward to flying out here for ages and it didn't disappoint. It's one of the most isolated places in the world, 2,237 miles east of Chile (5 hours on a plane) in the middle of the south pacific. It's got huge volcano craters, crystal clear waters, excellent surf, beaches and so much history you're tripping over it. We spent most of our time hiking, mountain biking and hitching our way around the island. It's about 12 miles from end to end and has around 3700 inhabitants, about 50% of which seemed to greet us at the airport as we got off the plane. Rather embarrassingly after waving back to everyone we realised they were greeting a celebrity Chilean couple walking behind us. The island was once inhabited by several ancient tribes, one of these carved huge monolithic stone heads (Moai) inside a volcano crater then dotted them all over the island. No one knows for sure how they managed to do this over 1600 years ago. Another later tribe was the 'Birdman cult' which had an unhealthy obsession with bird eggs. The Moai are representations of their ancestors, built to protect the villages. Ironically, the islanders pulled nearly all of them down during tribal conflict. The population later died out as they'd used up all the island's natural resources building the statues in the first place. We counted about 93 standing statues, 65 fallen statues and 24 being carved. The largest one was 71ft and was still in the process of being carved, but never got finished. There are more but counting gets a bit hard as some are little more than rubble now. Check out the video above of us cruising past 15 standing Moai on a quad bike. [Tom]